“I agree. But Vasili, I am concerned that tempers are running high and that there may be trouble. I think it would be better if…well, if certain people were on duty tonight.”
“Would those be the people I have just detailed off for spaceport patrol tonight, sir?”
“If the patrol includes d’Castreaux and Narayan, then yes.” What a pleasure it was, the admiral thought for a moment, to work with people who were ahead of her.
“Done, sir. And my spies tell me that the Dog and Duck is the focus of tonight’s activities, so I’ll have Petty Officer Nu’lini and the shore patrol close at hand just in case. And I’ll keep an eye out to make sure things stay under control.”
“You are a good man, Vasili.” The admiral chuckled. “Just make sure Petty Officer Nu’lini understands that there are to be no defaulters at the commander’s table tomorrow. None. Well, not from the vicinity of the Dog and Duck, that is.”
“Understood, sir. None it will be.”
“Good night, Vasili.”
As the landlord of the Dog and Duck shoveled a disheveled and very drunk Michael and the rest the team out the front door and into the early hours of a cool clear Terranovan night, the singing started.
“Oh, back of Casmirati, where the waters runs deep…”
But it was sad and mournful, all anger gone, for the moment at least.
The provost marshal grinned as he commed Petty Officer Nu’lini before gunning his jeep down the side road back to his house and his sleeping wife.
“Make sure they get home okay, Jack.”
“Will do, sir.”
Thursday, July 16, 2398, UD
“Chief Councillor?”
The old-fashioned intercom on the massive paper-strewn desk interrupted Jesse Merrick’s concentrated study of the substantial document in front of him. Not for him the convenience of face-mounted microvid screens. Like most Hammers, he preferred to read paper and always had.
“Kraa-damn it, Jackson, I said no interruptions.” Merrick’s face was dark with irritation; he had hoped to sign off the half-yearly review of the budget for the Hammer of Kraa Worlds that afternoon. It was a job he hated not least because every year it was the same old story: a hopelessly optimistic budget to start off with, approved by a compliant and craven People’s Assembly without so much as a single critical question, economic shortfalls almost from the first day of the new fiscal year in January, a crisis by March (a bad year) or May (a good year), and an emergency budget review in June before a whole new mess of cobbled-together emergency measures went back to the assembly for approval. And always against a background of simmering civil unrest.
If the business of running the Hammer Worlds wasn’t so serious, it would be a farce.
The only problem was that each year the farce got blacker as the Hammer Worlds stumbled farther and farther into an economic quagmire. No matter where he looked or how hard he tried, no matter how much he put the fear of Kraa into the bureaucrats, no matter how much he lashed Jeremiah Polk, councillor for the economy and finance, he could not see any way to change the situation. Unless the prohibitions on geneering and artificial intelligence (AI) were lifted, a proposition that would have him condemned to death by the Supreme Tribunal for the Preservation of the Faith if he ever spoke it aloud, the Hammer economy would stay stuck in second gear.
No. Geneering was absolutely proscribed by the Hammer’s founding charter, and the ban on AI was the product of five bloody years of civil war. It didn’t matter that the chief councillor privately thought that there had to be some way to reconcile the two with the demands of doctrine. Neither ban would change-ever. Removing those two pillars of the faith was as likely as Bodger, his faithful if rather dim-witted dog, becoming chief councillor.
And talking of contenders for his job, he wished he could say that Jeremiah Polk’s chances were as bad as Bodger’s, but increasingly the bloody man was looking like a real threat, he thought wearily. There had been a time when one of his favorite pastimes had been to encourage Polk to think that one day he would sit at the chief councillor’s desk. It had pleased him to see the pompous son of a bitch take his sarcastic goading seriously, although in retrospect maybe all he’d done was encourage the Kraa-damned bastard.
Maybe you’re not as smart as you think you are, Merrick, he told himself.
“Yes, Jackson. What do you want?”
“I thought you might like to know that Brigadier General Digby has arrived, sir.” The confidential secretary’s voice was flat and without emotion.
“Have him wait.” Merrick’s voice showed no trace of apology even though he belatedly remembered that he had specifically asked the long-suffering Jackson to tell him when Digby arrived.
After taking care to mark his place in the massive budget document and making a fruitless attempt to bring some order to his desk, Jesse sat back in his chair and wearily rubbed his eyes. By Kraa, he was tired, and he shouldn’t have been. He was only fifty-three years old and in the prime of his life, yet he felt an enormous weight of responsibility on his shoulders, a burden that only death would allow him to put down. There had never been such a thing as a happily retired chief councillor, and given the blood-soaked nature of Hammer politics, there probably never would be. Well, he consoled himself, at least I won’t have to live as long as all those heathen bastards out there. They were welcome to survive for 150 years; he’d be more than content with his Kraa-allotted 100.
Merrick keyed the intercom. “I’ll see Brigadier General Digby now.”
Seconds later, the door opened and the squat, heavily muscled figure of Brigadier General Julius Digby entered, thinning gray hair cut to a short stubble. Like a small dark tank and as energetic as ever, Merrick thought sourly. Does the man never slow down? He quickly put the thought aside as unworthy. Kraa’s work demanded energy as well as skill, experience, and an unshakable belief in doctrine, he reminded himself, and Digby had them all. And Kraa knew how important the task Digby was charged with was. Not for the first time, Merrick asked himself whether he should have sought the approval of his fellow councillors for what he and Digby had planned. As always, he concluded that there was no way he could trust such a bunch of garrulous, lily-livered fools. No, the risks were great enough without adding the possibility of early disclosure. The Federated Worlds’ response if they discovered what he and Digby were up to was not something he enjoyed thinking about. No, keep it compartmentalized, get the task done, and no one will be the wiser. The rewards were what mattered, and they were so enormous both for him and for the hard-pressed peoples of the Hammer Worlds that the risks had to be entertained.
There was no real choice. The future economic and social well-being of all the Hammer Worlds depended on it.
Merrick waved Digby into a chair.
“Brigadier General Digby, welcome back. How was Hell?” Merrick asked. It was his usual little joke and about as jolly as the chief councillor ever got. Not for nothing did his enemies, and they were legion, call him the Grim Reaper.
“Hell, sir.” That was Digby’s habitual response. “By Kraa, that place is well named. A more damned collection of lost souls is hard to imagine. But Prison Governor Costigan has things as well under control as ever.”
“He wasn’t curious?”
“He was very curious but took great care not to ask any questions. I think he knows when to keep his mouth shut, and I suspect he also knows how quickly he would join his charges if he didn’t.”
Digby’s face made it clear how much he enjoyed the thought of Prison Governor Costigan, a miserable and bitter man at the best of times and a man never easy to deal with, becoming one of the tens of thousands of unfortunates condemned to labor in the mass driver plants on the moons of Revelation-II, the second planet of the Revelation system.
The planet was unofficially but widely referred to as what it was-Hell. A living Hell. Unfortunately for its inmates, Hell and its moons were an important part of Commitment’s economy in a system devoid of other sources of mass for fusion-powered mass driver engines. Without ultracheap mass for starship engines, no space economy
